About

Waterloo Region During The First World War

In the Spring of 2013, Shelby Riddell and Scott McGeown graduated from Western University with a Bachelor of Arts Degrees in Honours History, and Joshua Pride from the University of Ottawa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science. All three group members are currently pursuing their Master’s degrees in History, Joshua and Shelby at the University of Waterloo and Scott at Wilfrid Laurier University. As members of History 602, at the University of Waterloo, the group constructed a historical website which examines how the Waterloo Region handled the outbreak of the First World War.

Shelby, Scott and Josh completed their Master Degrees in August 2014. In the fall of 2014, Shelby began pursuing a Post-Graduate Certificate in Corporate Communications and Public Relations at Sheridan College; Josh began a Bachelor of Education at Nipissing University; and Scott took the year off to travel abroad before pursuing another Masters degree in the fall of 2015.

In January 2015, the project was dusted off and expanded by a second cohort of Tri-University MA History students. Stephen Collins, Michael Etienne, Sarah McGarry, Kelly McKenzie, and Benjamin Toews teamed up and were able to include new material to the website, which now covers the local experience of the war until the end of August 1915. This group was fortunate to also include two German exchange students, Caterina Katzer and Sonja Schäfer, who were able to include translations of the German language Berliner Journal.

It is still the hope of everyone that this project will be carried on by future classes of History 602, so that the scope of the website may continue to expand.

We would like to give a special thanks to all of the individuals and institutions that have helped us create this historical website. We would like to thanks Professor Heather MacDougall at the University of Waterloo for giving her History 602 class the opportunity to do a digital history project like this. We would like to thank her for her guidance and input during this project. We would also like to thank Professor Geoffrey Hayes and Professor Ian Milligan at the University of Waterloo for lending us their expertise in local history and digital history, respectively. We would also like to thank our web developer Wesley Bush for his extensive efforts to make our visions come to life. This website would not be what it is today without your expertise.

We would also like to thank the librarians at the Kitchener Public Library for their help in accessing primary sources, including microfilm records of local newspapers. We would also like to thank the librarians in the Rare Books Room at the University of Waterloo for their help finding other valuable primary sources for our research on the Waterloo Region. Additionally, we would like to thank the Waterloo Region Museum for letting us go through their collections to find visual aids.

Finally, we would like to thank the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation. We would like to thank Professor Adam Crerar for acting as our contact within the Foundation and for helping us in anyway he could as the project progressed. More importantly, we would like to thank the foundation as a whole for their support. The Foundation has granted this project the Heritage award two years in a row. With this generous funding we were able to carry out more research and make the trips necessary to make this project as well rounded as possible. We will be forever grateful for their gracious support, and would like to thank the Foundation for their drive to further the region’s understanding of its own history.